Life, society, technology.

“Without any antecedent knowledge, without any warning whatever that such existed, he found himself an explorer in a totally new world. Now that the terrible unknown had let go of him, he forgot that the unknown had any terrors. He was aware only of curiosity in all the things about him.”

I was listening to the White Fang audio book on Audible. It is the first audio book I have bought on Audible (a subsidiary of Amazon). I wanted to check the last paragraph. I remembered that I had the eBook on Kindle as well, so I opened it anticipating that I would have to search for the paragraph. The Kindle app asked: “Your most recent page read is 64. Go to page 64?”. I chose “yes” not knowing where 64 actually was. Then I landed on the exact spot I was listening to on Audible. Could it be a coincidence? I remember reading up to about the same spot on Kindle before trying Audible but it was very unlikely that my last read page was exactly where I was on the audio book. So I experimented with them. Flipped a page back or fourth and switched to Audible and Audible asked the same question and landed where I was in the Kindle app.

This is great ubiquitous computing and great user interaction design. Nobody tried too hard to convince me to use Audible and Kindle together. No advertisement interrupted my YouTube video or a TV show to introduce this great feature to me. I just stumbled upon it by using both apps. I congratulate the people behind Kindle and Audible for such brilliant feature.